Man shares chilling Jervis Centre ghost experience as Tesco ‘haunted by nuns’

The city centre location has been the topic of conversation online this week after TikTok user @stephanie.zip shared a video of the elevators inside Tesco, which are located in the venue’s basement.

“Can’t unsee the fact Jervis Tesco used to be a morgue,” she said, showing off the lifts.

The revelation caused quite a stir among young social media users, many of whom didn’t know that the shopping centre had operated as Jervis Street Hospital until 1987.

Founded in 1718 by a group of surgeons as the Charitable Infirmary, the hospital originally operated on Cook Street in the Liberties before relocating to a larger premises on King’s Inn’s Quay a decade later.

In 1796, the hospital moved to the Earl of Charlemont’s former mansion at 14 Jervis Street, where the Jervis Shopping Centre stands today.

The Sisters of Mercy took over the hospital in 1854 and continued to run it up until its closure in the late 1980s.

And while the building was reconstructed as a shopping centre in the 1990s with only the facade of the original hospital remaining, dozens of people are now claiming the grounds are haunted by exchanging their ghost stories and spooky happenings.

One TikToker left other users shaking in their boots when he recalled one unexplainable incident that took place while he worked in the shopping centre as a security guard.

He prefaced the story by stating that he’s “very much a sceptical person” and an atheist – but this is one thing he hasn’t been able to explain.

“While I was working in the security control room, we let a man in for a delivery down on the loading bay… It’s a completely underground area,” he said in the clip.

“In that area, there are multiple corridors to bring you to different points of the shopping centre to deliver the goods. One of them in particular is a very long, windy, and kind of claustrophobic space.

“It’s really unnerving the first time you go down there, but there are cameras everywhere.

“This guy was pushing this pallet down the corridor and at one point, he was walking down the corridor and turned back around to look at something. We just saw him talking so we changed to the other camera to see who he’s talking to but there’s nothing there.

“He keeps walking and then he stops again and starts talking again.”

The TikTok user, who posts under the screenname @governor91, continued, saying that the delivery worker then contacted security.

“He says, ‘Hey, there’s some old lady down here. She’s lost and she’s saying that she doesn’t recognise where she is. I’m trying to give her directions to get out… She’s just down the end of the corridor.’

“We’re looking on the cameras and we can’t see anything and he had to look back out in the corridor and she wasn’t there anymore.

“He comes up to the control room, he gives us a full description, we’re looking out for her on the shopping centre cameras – nothing. We rewound the cameras and we were thinking, ‘This is really weird because you wouldn’t miss a person.’

“We show him the footage and he was like, ‘She was fully dressed. I think she was a nun,’ and that’s when we were like, ‘Oh f**k.’

“We had heard so many stories and some of the lads were very superstitious, but they were like, ‘Oh, that’s her. It’s the nun that haunts Jervis.’

“I had never seen a face like the delivery driver’s. His face went white. That guy had 100pc seen someone and now he’s being told that that person was never there. He was terrified.

“I can’t explain that and I can’t take that experience from that guy, but I’ve never seen fear in someone like that where he realised either he was crazy or that what he just spoke to was a ghost.”

There have been myriad reported ghost sightings in Jervis, many of them involving nuns, who “all seem to be lost”, according to content creator Jane Casey.

The history buff appeared on Newstalk today to speak to Sean Moncrieff about the supernatural phenomenon.

Jane accepted that the influx of ghost stories “could just be mass hysteria” but listed a host of examples that people had shared.

“The stories going around are that people see nuns floating around the loading bay and asking for directions,” she explained.

“Of course people were seeing nuns – the Sisters of Mercy were managing it in the 1850s!

“There have been reports of spooky happenings all over the building… One person said that a well-dressed man would appear translucent and would walk through walls.

“Apparently there’s one video where a piece of fruit from the smoothie stand goes flying past a security guard’s head after hours. I haven’t seen it so I can’t verify it, but a lot of spooky things happen!”